Mousie (1997)

September 12 - Today I got up earlier than I have in months, well, weeks anyway. I did a load of wash and called and called and called about a mousetrap. I thought if I catch this mouse alive, I will keep it as a pet. I’ll get it a HABITRAIL or something and name it. In the meantime I called a small-animal vet and she said feral mice don’t tame down well and will always long for their freedom. She said it will try to escape until the day it dies. I guess I’ll try to live capture it with a bucket. Then I can take it out to a rocky field with enough natural cover to hide it from predators. I’d like to give it a better chance of survival. One more thing to do.

September 20
Grrr...where are the compassionate traps? Please leave, please leave, please leave.

September 30
Stupid live traps. Don't make me do this, PLEASE leave.

October 12
Well it’s over, the mouse thing. It came to a most poignant end. The mouse who moved into my house was little and chocolate brown with beady, black eyes. It was so cute. I baited the live-capture traps from the hardware store with peanut butter and strategically set them out. In the morning they were both sprung. I was nervous before I picked the traps up, but they were empty. I set them again. That night I awoke and saw a little mouse sitting at the side of my laptop computer. It was just at eye level with me as I lay there in bed, and about twelve inches from my nose. It looked me directly in the eye. Before it skittered out of sight, I saw an expression in its beady little eyes. The expression was that of curiosity. I realized that it had been curious about me and came to see what I was. I could tell it knew I was alive.

In the morning both traps were sprung. Again, they were empty. I set them a third time and they were never, ever were sprung again, even though I waited until the peanut butter bait went rancid. I threw the traps out. A few middle of the nights later during one of my interminable wakenings, I opened my eyes to see my mouse swinging from the cord of the hanging, white, Japanese-paper lamp above my bed. The mouse was at my eye-level, again. It looked directly in my eyes and then hopped down, out of my sight. I was disturbed, not only about these current, nocturnal encounters, but about such future meetings. I am afraid of things that go about in the dark, they make me nervous. The next day I drove nearly to the California-Mexico border looking for a shop (which by the way I never found) I hoped would have a more sophisticated live-capture trap. I made thirty phone calls looking for any such place. And ultimately, I never found one.

So, I talked to everyone I could about what to do. They all said, “Just get a snap-trap, there’s not much else you can do.” They told me the ugly scenario of the trap not killing instantly was highly unlikely. I suppose I don’t need to enumerate the reasons a feral mouse is not desirable in the house. Still, if that was the way it was going to be, I felt the need to rationalize the death of the unfortunate thing. I couldn’t think of myself as the willful murderer of a sentient being. The days ticked by. I cleaned up the feces from the little guy. Thoughts of Hanta virus passed through my head. Eventually, I got the snap-traps.

Baiting traps is an art, at least this is what the card which came with the magic candle said. The magic candle was to be melted and dripped onto the Bait Platform; fifteen drops. The wax was supposedly a strong attractant. But yummy smelling bait was only part of the seductive lure I was to build. The card which came with the candle had a cotton ball stapled to it. The card said that sometimes mice are more interested in nesting materials than they are in food. It advised me to melt a tiny tuft from the cotton ball into the fifteen drops of wax bait, so the cotton was firmly attached. I made an art of the act of baiting the traps. The baiting was the ritual and the little magic-candle’s flame was the funeral offering. I felt terribly sad. This was, after all, premeditated murder.

The little card also said that mice really don’t see well in the dark. The nursery rhyme ran through my head. The card said mice run along the edges of things. See how they run! They feel their way along with their whiskers; racing along the walls, they skitter from room to room. See how they run. Their whiskers feel things in the dark; their whiskers discriminate between hard and soft surfaces. I thought about this inference of sentience. In the glow of the night light, this mouse had looked me directly in the eye. The little card suggested that if the cotton was teased out in length and the trap was placed near the wall, the mouse would feel the softness of the cotton with its whiskers while it was running by. See how they run. It would try to take the bait, even if it wasn’t hungry.

I needed a break after baiting the traps. The fact of the action of baiting made any kind of extensive denial impossible. The act of baiting the two snap-traps was a death ritual. I abandoned the ritual temporarily, leaving the room to escape the reminder of the inevitable horror in store for the mouse. When I returned to clean up the mess I had made baiting the traps, the magic candle was gone; it had disappeared from the ashtray where I had laid it to cool. My mouse had absconded with it. I guess the smell was irresistible.

I couldn’t bring myself to set the traps. They sat on the table until late afternoon. They sat while I gathered courage to make my stand. As the sun fell behind the trees, I set the spring-loaded mechanism and placed the end with the bait platform nearest the wall. Within minutes, I heard the trap in the hallway snap. There was a scream of terror and pain. The mouse screamed one cut-off note with its tiny vocal cords and then was silent. I went to the trap. The mouse had died instantly, its skull smashed beyond recognition. I folded a newspaper around it and took it to the trash can. I was thankful it had not lingered in misery, but died almost before it knew what was happening.

I returned to the house and sat down, relieved the problem was gone, the nasty task finished, the episode shut. I had been sitting about half an hour, when to my great shock, the second trap, the one in the kitchen, snapped. There was a scream and a scuttering sound and a second, longer scream. I went to the kitchen, and there, to my horror was a mouse trapped by the base of its tail and it left hip. It looked at me for help; there is no denying the pleading look it gave me. I turned the water on and plugged the sink, preparing to drown the little thing. I thought about feeding it to the garbage disposal. Frozen in horror, I had become stupid, I could think of no other alternatives.

Then I saw a white-foam take-out container lying on top of the contents of the garbage can. The mouse was still crying in pain when I scooped it into the snow-colored foam container and snapped the lid shut. I put the container in the freezer. In retrospect, it was a cruel action, I should have taken the personal responsibility to smash its little head. I had discounted the possibility of this scenario, I had not prepared for it. I was taken by self-made surprise. This life and death stuff is tricky. I reasoned that it would freeze quickly and as it froze its sensations would decrease, including the pain of a badly smashed hip. I closed my freezer door and pushed remembrance of the trauma from my mind.

Today was trash pick-up, and I wanted to be rid of the corpses as soon as possible. I removed the white take-out container from the freezer and started toward the trash can, the one containing the body of the frozen mouse’s pal. I placed the can at the curb last night in case the trash truck came early this morning or I slept late. I said little apologies to the dead creatures silently, regretting this outcome. The carton was still sealed.

Why I chose to look in the carton I will never know. But look I did. I must have been meant to look. What I saw was the mouse, frozen into a near fetal position, limited by having its back quarters caught in a trap. It seemed like it was peacefully asleep. It had grasped the bit of cotton fuzz which had attracted it, in it front paws, and clutched it to its chest and lower chin. It had died trying to comfort itself.

Now it is the afternoona and I’m still pushing the images from my mind, exorcizing the experience from a temptation to obsess. I’m sorry the way things turned out for the little mice. If I was sensible like an archaic human or arctic wolf, I would have honored their existence by becoming a part of the natural cycle and eating them. But I’m human, sophisticated enough to eschew eating rodents (well, maybe rabbits), sensitive enough to grieve for their little chocolate selves, ruthless enough to have dispatched them.